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This is brilliant. For the first time, Joy Division fans are given an insight not only into Ian Curtis, the mysterious captivating frontman of a band, but also Ian as the person; the family man, the human being.

This isn't (as other reviews might suggest) the memoir of a bitter and resentful wife, desperately wanting a small piece of the limelight that her husband so coldly denied her. She gives credit where it is due. She continually refers to Ian's 'caring and generous' side, the love she felt for him before and during their marriage, and how lost she felt when her love eventually wasn't returned. The reader is taken on a journey through the life of Deborah Curtis after she met Ian, how she was made to feel at the different stages, what it felt like to be caught in the trappings of mundane 'everyday' life as her childhood sweetheart realised his dreams of a successful band.

It is true, Ian was a troubled person. Deborah Curtis, instead of pretending to understand the motives for his actions, tells the situation from her point of view; she felt alienated, misinformed, lied to, isolated, abandoned. She doesn't pretend to know her husband well enough to be able to say 'this WAS the reason he did this' etc. Although she was his wife, the closest person to Ian, she, like everyone else, ultimately had no clue as to what went on in his sadly tormented mind.

A common problem I've noticed with books such as this is that, when the 'facts' are not entirely clear, the author will infer truths and make it dramatic. This doesn't happen in this book. When Deborah is sure of what happened, she writes it. But so often, she seems as alienated as everyone else in Ian's life, and she expresses this also. This is effective because it makes the book so real. When a person, especially a successful musican, commits suicide, it's so easy to get caught up in what THEY must have been feeling at the time. This book makes such a topic all the more 'real', because it shows exactly how others close to the person can be affected. It's a sad read, at times confusing, and entertaining. But above all, it is honest.

Essential.

I read Deborah Curtis' book a couple of months ago and have been surprised that I have not felt the same about the memory of Ian Curtis that I had since I heard he had died so many years ago. I saw Joy Division in concert when I was 15 years old in London and a couple of times on TV, I was hooked. I grew up wondering what kind of life this man had, what he was experiencing, what made him so bizarre on stage (see the video "Here are the Young Men"). I have grown up and for the most part still wondered about these unanswered questions. I hoped that reading Deborah's book would help me understand a bit more and I was not disappointed. The book was not about the music, but about the man, his dreams and his failures. This is what we as fans did not see, we only saw this pail white man with thrashing arms singing about stuff that we did not necessarily understand, but knew he saw singing for us. Thank you Deborah for a wonderful insight into your life with Ian Curtis. Hopefully he can now rest in peace.

20+ years ago, I reviewed Closer for a university newspaper; I still agree with Bono that Ian Curtis's voice is holy, and with Kurt Cobain that "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is the most beautiful song written. I've recently been rediscovering Joy Division, and so have read Deborah Curtis's memoir of her life with Ian. This is a remarkable book. Deborah was never an industry insider, a musician or a groupie; she seems to have been a sensitive yet very practical girl, who mostly wanted a conventional sort of marriage where they would raise children and maintain their house. Yet she was also really drawn to Ian's ambitious taste in music and his brooding romantic singularity, and she genuinely supported his desire to be a musician and believed in his genius. The book mostly follows the period from their marriage through the formation of Warsaw (later Joy Division), with extensive discussion of tours and recording sessions, through to Ian's suicide shortly before the band was to embark on its first American tour. At the same time, it describes the medical crises following Ian's diagnosis with a severe, virtually untreatable form of epilepsy, the birth of their daughter Natalie, and Deborah's discovery of her husband's affair with Annik Honore. To her credit, Deborah keeps her perspective consistent, refusing to speculate on others' responses. This makes more heartbreaking the extent to which she was gradually shut out of Ian's life, with the apparent complicity of the band and its management, as she became apparently insufficiently glamorous for the role of rock star consort. Yet while this book both deconstructs and humanizes the myth, rendering Ian Curtis an often viciously callous husband, Deborah never comes across as spiteful herself: she did what she could, and more, and always realized she'd have to learn to live on her own, and she never gave up on him, so that the glimmerings of mutual tenderness in their final difficult days are almost unbearably sad. Inadvertantly perhaps, she reveals a very young man whose visions were almost too great for him to bear, and whose loss of control over his life and health terrified him into severe depression, and she reveals a taciturn community in which she and Ian felt driven into an unspoken compact to cope by themselves. This isn't a depressing book; it isn't over-analytical, and there is real wit in her episodic treatment of their courtship, and her outsider's perspective on the Manchester music scene (such as when they go see the Sex Pistols, with Ian excited at the prospect of a band who 'fought on stage'). This book should be required reading for anyone whose introduction to Joy Division was the film 24 Hour Party People, whose history of the band is severely truncated and takes great liberties with the facts. Actually, I'd love to see the players in that part of the film in a film of Deborah Curtis's book. This is a brave and wonderful, incredibly intimate memoir, straightforward and unpretentious. It also includes an introduction by stellar punk historian Jon Savage, lyrics, as well as performance and recording information, and there is a centre section of photographs, some official (including an incandescent colour picture of Ian singing with his eyes closed in April 1980), some family snapshots (including a very cute engagement picture, and Ian with Natalie a few days before his death).